More effort needed to tackle child poverty
The Leader of Inverclyde Council is to ask for the Scottish and UK Government’s help in tackling child poverty in the area.
Latest figures from End Child Poverty suggest more than 1 in 4 children in Inverclyde are living in poverty and in some areas the figure is as high as 1 in 3.
Councillor Stephen McCabe, who is also Inverclyde’s welfare and financial inclusion champion, said: “It is desperately sad to think of a single child living below the poverty line but it is a cold, hard fact that families in our communities are struggling to make ends meet and inevitably it is the children that suffer. We are doing an awful lot in Inverclyde to mitigate the impact of poverty such as investing in our schools to provide the best possible education and working hard with other organisations to tackle inequalities.”
Inverclyde Council and the community planning partnership, the Inverclyde Alliance, have a number of approaches in place which are working to tackle child poverty across Inverclyde.
Much of this work is taken forward by the Financial Inclusion Partnership, but other initiatives such as the attainment challenge, the nurturing Inverclyde collaborative, the child poverty subgroup of the best start in life outcome delivery group, the developing family support model in Broomhill in Greenock and the new approach being developed for the community planning partnership in regard to tackling inequalities will all have an impact on child poverty.
Councillor McCabe added: “The community planning approach is the best means to address poverty but that requires cooperation both locally and nationally. Inverclyde Council is determined to get it right for every child, citizen and community and we can achieve much in the long term through raising attainment and getting more people ready for work and into work where they can earn a living wage. But, with national policies such as welfare reform there will be an inevitable impact on levels of poverty in areas of deprivation which local organisations can have very little influence on There is a clear role for the Scottish and UK Governments in tackling poverty and there is a role for Inverclyde Council in setting out a series of specific ‘asks’ to help the Council tackle poverty locally.”